Nonliteral language understanding has always been recognized as problematic in autistic individuals. We ran a study on 26 autistic children (mean age = 7.3 years) and 2 comparison groups of typically developing children, 1 matched for chronological age, and 1 of younger peers (mean age = 6.11 years) matched for linguistic abilities, aiming at assessing their understanding of ironic criticisms and compliments, and identifying the cognitive and linguistic factors that may underpin this ability. Autistic participants lagged behind the comparison groups in the comprehension of both types of irony, and their performance was related to mindreading and linguistic abilities. Significant correlations were found between first-order Theory of Mind (ToM) and both types of irony, between second-order ToM and ironic compliments, and between linguistic abilities and ironic criticisms. The autistic group displayed an interesting, and previously unattested in the literature, bimodal distribution: the great majority of them (n = 18) displayed a very poor performance in irony understanding, whereas some (n = 6) were at ceiling. We discuss these results in terms of two different profiles of autistic children.

Much research has documented that second language (L2) development of tense and aspect markers is influenced by a range of factors that include cross-linguistic influences, phonological nature of forms, inherent semantics of predicates, and discourse structure. Nonetheless, relatively little research has examined the role of discourse organization in the development of tense and aspect marking. To expand our understanding of L2 tense and aspect, this study examined child L2 development of English tense and aspect in oral narratives in relation to the foregrounding and backgrounding of narrative discourse. Thirty-eight learners’ oral narratives were elicited, using Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) three points in time: kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. The foreground in oral narratives was associated with more frequent use of the simple past than the background across the grade levels. While the occurrence of the simple past did not necessarily mark the foreground, the simple past emerged as the dominant form in the foreground in Grade 1. In the background, on the other hand, it took longer for the past forms to catch up with the non-past forms. The simple past became dominant in the background in Grade 2.

The study investigated the strategies used by Chinese students in inferring meanings of unfamiliar words and the influential factors of successful use of different lexical inferencing strategies. A total of 104 fourth graders inferred 36 unfamiliar semitransparent compound words in three conditions: word in isolation, contextual information only, and both word and context. Results revealed that students were more likely to obtain the correct meaning of words when both morphological information and contextual information were available. The likelihood of using a morpheme-based or context-based lexical inferencing strategy was strongly influenced by the presentation condition of target words and precursors. Students with higher vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension ability were more sensitive to morphological and contextual information and were able to synthesize multiple sources of information, whereas children with lower vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension ability showed difficulties in integration and tended to overly rely on morphological information. The findings reveal the interactions between available source information and individual differences in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in predicting lexical inferencing and have implications for vocabulary and reading instruction.

This study examines how properties of path (the trajectory of motion) and manner (how an action is performed) components of motion events are reflected in linguistic and nonlinguistic motion event conceptualization in a path-focused language, Turkish. In two experiments, we investigated how path and manner differed in salience (i.e., prominence) and ease of expression (EoE, i.e., effort of describing), and how these factors were related to lexicalization and similarity judgments of motion events. In Experiment 1, participants rated motion events based on path and manner salience and EoE and expressed path and manner in a written format. Results indicated that manner was rated as more salient and path as easier to express. Path salience and EoE were related to both types (i.e., number of different expressions) and the total number of paths and manners used. However, manner EoE but not salience was associated with only types and the total number of manners used. In Experiment 2, participants rated the similarity of motion event pairs created using the ratings in Experiment 1. We found that higher manner salience and EoE difference were associated with lower similarity ratings. These findings suggest that salience and EoE of path and manner are related to both linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of motion event conceptualization.

This study investigated whether adult and 3- to 6-year-old native speakers of Russian can use gender-marked adjectives to predict the upcoming noun during sentence comprehension. In a visual world paradigm, participants heard questions (e.g., Где хороший синий ёжик? Gde horošij sinij ëžik? “Where is the nicemasc bluemasc hedgehogmasc?”) including two gender-marked adjectives and a noun while seeing pictures of a target and a distractor of either the same (e.g., ёжик ëžik “hedgehogmasc,” мишка miška “bearmasc”) or different gender (e.g., ёжик ëžik “hedgehogmasc,” собачка sobačka “dogfem”) on the screen. We examined whether participants could use gender-marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun). Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses revealed that both adults and children anticipated the upcoming noun before its onset. The magnitude of the anticipation effect was stronger for adults than children. Subsequent analyses on the child data did not show evidence that age modulated their anticipation ability. The results of this study extend and improve knowledge regarding the role of adjectives that carry a grammatical gender cue in online sentence processing.

Exposure to statistical patterns of language use affects language production and comprehension. In this longitudinal study of English language learner (ELL) university students, we examined the interplay between language experience and language statistics as a window into the formation and stability of morphological representations in memory. We hypothesized that within-participant change in sensitivity to distributional properties of complex words on written production would reflect changes in morphological knowledge. At two timepoints, separated by 8 months of language exposure, a sample of ELLs (n = 196) completed a written suffix completion task. The largest gains in production accuracy were observed for derived words ending in less productive suffixes. In addition, across both timepoints we found a consistent effect of derivational family entropy, such that derived words belonging to morphological families with equally dominant members were less accurately produced. Both effects indicate that ELLs exploit distributional cues to morphological structure and shed light on two aspects of morphological knowledge in ELLs. First, knowledge of suffixes becomes more entrenched in memory, independently of knowledge of the full forms of derived words. Second, ELLs draw upon interlexical connections between morphological family members during written word production.

We know a great deal about children’s first steps into reading. Here, we explore how they become more sophisticated readers, learning to read complex words. Theoretical accounts predict that one key factor is morphological awareness, or awareness of the minimal units of meaning in language. And yet empirical studies have yet to clarify whether morphological awareness has a stronger relation to the development of reading skill for words with multiple morphemes in particular (i.e., morphological decoding) or to the reading of a whole range of words. We examined this question in this study by contrasting the role of morphological awareness in the development of morphological decoding and of broader word reading skill. Participants were 197 English-speaking children who were followed from Grade 3 to 4. We conducted longitudinal analyses that included stringent autoregressive controls to capture the determinants of gains over time, as well as controls for vocabulary and phonological awareness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis with this set of controls revealed that morphological awareness predicted significant unique gains in morphological decoding from Grade 3 to 4 with no such unique contributions to broader word reading skill. These findings clarify the role of morphological awareness in supporting children in developing the ability to read morphologically complex words, supporting a more targeted role for morphology in theories of word reading development.

The present study investigated the effects of processing instruction (PI) on the acquisition of accusative case markers in German, focusing on whether PI influences learners’ online processing behaviors. Third and fourth semester L1 English-L2 German learners were divided into two groups: a traditional instruction (TI) group and a PI group. Participants completed offline sentence interpretation and production tasks, as well as a self-paced reading (SPR) task, which provides a detailed investigation of how PI alters processing strategies. Results showed that the PI group outperformed the TI group on the sentence interpretation task and matched their performance on the production task. The SPR task revealed that, in some conditions, the PI group showed increased attention to and processing of accusative case markers after training, while the TI group did not. The results provide some support for the claim that PI is effective because it alters learners’ processing strategies.